the adjustments each organization has to make to accomodate the other partici- 

 pants tend to be achieved in an incremental manner. 



In the Cedar River case, for example, the Washington law that allowed a 

 State agency to apply for minimum stream flows, and then authorized the 

 Washington Department of Ecology to promulgate an appropriate flow regime, can 

 be seen as an incremental effort on the part of the State legislature to 

 adjust Washington water law so that instream values could be protected. This 

 statute, then, is incremental in the first sense. Secondly, the way in which 

 the State Department of Fisheries developed its flow recommendations, based on 

 past experience and field studies, on the one hand, and then adjusted that 

 recommendation as it consulted with other agencies, on the other, can also be 

 seen as incremental. Finally, the annual summer negotiation sessions among 

 the parties in the Cedar River case are incremental. Each organization comes 

 to the negotiation with its position only slightly altered from the last 

 encounter, and each organization then adjusts its position incrementally as 

 bargaining and compromise ensues. 



The way in which organizations tend to bargain and compromise in this 

 latter sense, however, is also influenced by the general context of the 

 instream flow issue; this relates to the second major theoretical thrust of 

 LIAM, which is explained in the following paragraphs. 



3.2 DECISION ARENA 



A "decision arena" can be thought of as a bounded area in which action of 

 one type or another occurs. According to Lowi (1972), most policy decisions 

 are typically made in one of four major arenas: (1) distributive, (2) regula- 

 tory, (3) redistributive, or (4) constituent. The first two, distributive and 

 regulatory, are the primary arenas in which instream flow decisions are made. 

 This is because the other two policy areas identified by Lowi have only an 

 indirect bearing on instream flows. Redistributive policies concern such 

 issues as taxation, and the Federal Reserve's credit controls, for example, 

 while constituent policies are the result of direct actions by groups in 

 society to shape the nature of politics itself, as in the case of reappor- 

 tionment or the creation of a new government agency. 



Distributive policies divide benefits and services throughout society and 

 have tended to be in the form of such things as subsidies and construction 

 grants, project authorizations, and sales of Federal lands. In this arena, 

 the Government acts as a policy "broker," and groups compete with one another 

 to obtain these benefits and services (Lowi 1972; Mann 1982a; Ripley and 

 Franklin 1984). Mann (1982a) asserts that distributive politics at the 

 National level has been one of the "hardiest flowers in the policy-making 

 garden, withstanding the assaults of fiscal freezes, economic/analytical 

 pruning, and the best of environmental pollution control." At the interorgani- 

 zational level, it is a highly political arena in which politicians base their 

 ultimate decisions regarding who gets what upon such factors as perceptions of 

 current power relationships among the groups, public support for one proposal 

 over another, or favors owed by the political entity to the groups involved 

 (Lowi 1972; Doerksen and Lamb 1979; Lamb and Lovrich 1986). 



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